Movie Discussion: Love Streams (1984) by John Cassavetes
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The electric filmmaking genius John Cassavetes and his brilliant wife and collaborator Gena Rowlands give luminous, fragile performances as two closely bound, emotionally wounded souls who reunite after years apart. Robert, a successful writer of pulp fiction, is emotionally remote and skilled at pushing away anyone who tries to enter his life. Sarah, a housewife whose marriage is on the rocks, is deeply feeling and believes that everyone needs something — anything — to love. Exhilarating and risky, mixing sober realism with surreal flourishes, Love Streams is a remarkable film that comes at the viewer in a torrent of beautiful, erratic feeling. This inquiry into the nature of love in all its forms was Cassavetes’s last truly personal work.
“The movie is a mighty, intimate, kaleidoscopically subjective, bravely self-searching summation of a career, an era, and a life.” (New Yorker)
"A rich, inviting work, full of beauty and vitality." (MUBI)
"His single best picture, the one that consolidates all his strengths and most lucidly translates his many themes as a storyteller." (PopMatters)
"Viewers raised on trained and tame movies may be uncomfortable in the world of Cassavetes; his films are built around lots of talk and the waving of arms and the invoking of the gods... Sometimes the wild truth-telling approach evaporates into a lot of empty talk and play-acting. In Love Streams, it works." (Roger Ebert)
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Let's discuss the 1984 movie Love Streams written and directed by the pioneer of modern American independent cinema John Cassavetes (1929-1989), recently voted the 140th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of filmmakers. The film won the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the 34th Berlin International Film Festival. The New Yorker wrote in 2013 that Cassavetes "may be the most influential American director of the last half century".
Please watch the movie in advance (141 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the meeting. You can stream it here (check the player settings for subtitles or to adjust quality) or rent it through Criterion or other streaming platforms (for best quality).
Recommended reading: An interesting chat on why Cassavetes rejected method acting. Was Cassavetes a reader of Deleuze?
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Check out other movie discussions in the group, currently happening about 2 or 3 times a month.
This link here is a spreadsheet of the approximately 200 movies we've watched in this group and my ratings for each. You're invited to share your ratings too if you've watched a bunch of these movies with us. (I can add your list here if you send me a link. You can make your own list on sites like Letterboxd or by copying my spreadsheet and filling in your own values. Note that my list doesn't include every movie that Yorgo hosted on cause I didn't watch them all.)